I could I have established in the bosom of one who stole such a principle of abhorrence at the meanness of dishonesty that he was prevailed upon to steal no more, he might still have retained a heart as completely unturned to God, and as totally unpossessed by a principle of love to him, as before. In a word, though I might have made him a more upright and honourable man, I might have left him as destitute of the essence of religious principle as ever. But the interesting fact is, that during the whole of that period in which I made no attempt against the natural enmity of the mind to God, while I was inattentive to the way in which this enmity is dissolved, even by the free offer on the one hand, and the believing acceptance on the other, of the gospel salvation; while Christ, through whose blood the sinner, who by nature stands afar off, is brought near to the heavenly Lawgiver whom he has offended, was scarcely ever spoken of, or spoken of in such a way as stripped him of all the importance of his character and his offices, even at this time I certainly did press the reformations of honour, and truth, and integrity among my people; but I never once heard of any such reformations having been effected amongst them. If there was anything at all brought about in this way, it was more than ever I got any account of. I am not sensible that all the vehemence with which I urged the virtues and the proprieties of social life had the weight of a feather on the moral habits of my parishioners. And it was not till I got impressed by the utter alienation of the heart in all its desires and affections from God; it was not till reconciliation to him became the distinct and the prominent object of my ministerial exertions; it was not till I took the Scriptural way of laying the method of reconciliation before them; it was not till the free offer of forgiveness through the blood of Christ was urged upon their acceptance, and the Holy Spirit given through the channel of Christ's mediatorship to all who ask him, was set before them as the unceasing object of their dependence and their prayers; it was not, in one word, till the contemplations of my people were turned to these great and essential elements in the business of a soul providing for its interest with God and the concerns of its eternity, that I ever heard of any of those subordinate reformations which I aforetime made the earnest and the zealous, but, I am afraid, at the same time, the ultimate object of my earlier ministrations. . . . You have at least taught me that to preach Christ is the only effective way of preaching morality in all its branches; and out of your humble cottages have I gathered a lesson, which I pray God

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I may be enabled to carry with all its simplicity into a wider theatre, and to bring with all the power of its subduing efficacy upon the vices of a more crowded population.

Address to the Inhabitants of Kilmany, in his Tracts.

THE INSIGNIFICANCE OF THE EARTH. Though the earth were to be burned up, though the trumpet of its dissolution were sounded, though yon sky were to pass away as a scroll, and every visible glory which the finger of the Divinity has inscribed on it were extinguished for ever, an event so awful to us, and to every world in our vicinity, by which so many suns would be extinguished, and so many varied scenes of life and population would rush into forgetfulness,-what is it in the high scale of the Almighty's workmanship? a mere shred, which, though scattered into nothing, would leave the universe of God one entire scene of greatness and of majesty. Though the earth and the heavens were to disappear, there are other worlds which roll afer; the light of other suns shines upon them; and the sky which mantles them is garnished with other stars. Is it presumption to say that the moral world extends to these distant and unknown regions? that they are occupied with people? that the charities of home and of neighbourhood flourish there? that the praises of God are there lifted up, and his goodness rejoiced in? that there piety has its temples and its offerings? and the richness of the divine attributes is there felt and admired by intelligent worshippers?

And what is this world in the immensity which teems with them; and what are they who occupy it? The universe at large would suffer as little in its splendour and variety by the destruction of our planet, as the verdure and sublime magnitude of a forest would suffer by the fall of a single leaf. The leaf quivers on the branch which supports it. It lies at the mercy of the slightest accident. A breath of wind tears it from its stem, and it lights on the stream of water which passes underneath. In a moment of time the life, which we know by the microscope it teems with, is extinguished; and an occurrence so insignificant in the eye of man, and on the scale of his observation, carries in it to the myriads which people this little leaf an event as terrible and as decisive as the destruction of a world. Now, on the grand scale of the universe, we, the occupiers of this ball, which performs its little round among the suns and the systems that astronomy has unfolded,-we may feel the same littleness and the same insecurity.

We differ from the leaf only in this circumstance, that it would require the operation of greater elements to destroy us. But these elements exist. The fire which ranges within may lift its devouring energy to the surface of our planet, and transform it into one wide and wasting volcano. The sudden formation of elastic matter in the bowels of the earth-and it lies within the agency of known substances to accomplish this-may explode it into fragments. The exhalation of noxious air from below may impart a virulence to the air that is around us; it may affect the delicate proportion of its ingredients; and the whole of animated nature may wither and die under the malignity of a tainted atmosphere. A blazing comet may cross this fated planet in its orbit, and realise all the terrors which superstition has conceived of it. We cannot anticipate with precision the consequences of an event which every astronomer must know to lie within the limits of chance and probability. It may hurry our globe towards the sun, or drag it to the outer regions of the planetary system, or give a new axis of revolution, and the effect, which I shall simply announce without explaining it, would be to change the place of the ocean, and bring another mighty flood upon our islands and continents. These are changes which may happen in a single instant of time, and against which nothing known in the present system of things provides us with any security. They might not annihilate the earth, but they would unpeople it, and we, who tread its surface with such firm and assured footsteps, are at the mercy of devouring elements, which, if let loose upon us by the hand of the Almighty, would spread solitude, and silence, and death over the dominions of the world.

Now, it is this littleness and insecurity which make the protection of the Almighty so dear to us, and bring with such emphasis to every pious bosom the holy lessons of humility and gratitude. The God who sitteth above, and presides in high authority over all worlds, is mindful of man; and though at this moment his energy is felt in the remotest provinces of creation, we may feel the same security in his providence as if we were the objects of his undivided care.

It is not for us to bring our minds up to this mysterious agency. But such is the incomprehensible fact, that the same Being whose eye is abroad over the whole universe, gives vegetation to every blade of grass, and motion to every particle of blood which circulates through the veins of the minutest animal; that though his mind takes into his comprehensive grasp immensity and all its wonders, I am as much known to him as if

I were the single object of his attention; that he marks all my thoughts; that he gives birth to every feeling and every movement within me; and that, with an exercise of power which I can neither describe nor comprehend, the same God who sits in the highest heaven, and reigns over the glories of the firmament, is at my right hand to give me every breath which I draw, and every comfort which I enjoy.

CRUELTY TO ANIMALS.

Man is the direct agent of a wide and continual distress to the lower animals, and the question is, Can any method be devised for its alleviation? On this subject that Scriptural image is strikingly realized, "The whole inferior creation groaning and travailing together in pain," because of him. It signifies not to the substantive amount of the suffering whether this be prompted by the hardness of his heart, or only permitted through the heedlessness of his mind. In either way it holds true, not only that the arch-devourer man stands pre-eminent over the fiercest children of the wilderness as an animal of prey, but that for his lordly and luxurious appetite, as well as for his service or merest curiosity and amusement, Nature must be ransacked throughout all her elements. Rather than forego the ver iest gratifications of vanity, he will wring them from the anguish of wretched and illfated creatures; and whether for the indulgence of his barbaric sensuality or barbaric splendour, can stalk paramount over the sufferings of that prostrate creation which has been placed beneath his feet. That beauteous domain whereof he has been constituted the terrestrial sovereign gives out so many blissful and benignant aspects; and whether we look to its peaceful lakes, or to its flowery landscapes, or its evening skies, or to all that soft attire which overspreads the hills and the valleys, lighted up by smiles of sweetest sunshine, and where animals disport themselves in all the exuberance of gaiety,-this surely were a more befitting scene for the rule of clemency than for the iron rod of a murderous and remorseless tyrant.

But the present is a mysterious world wherein we dwell. It still bears much upon its materialism of the impress of Paradise. But a breath from the air of Pandemonium has gone over its living generations; and so "the fear of man and the dread of man is now upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, and upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into man's hands are they delivered: every moving thing that liveth is

meat for him; yea, even as the green herbs, there have been given to him all things." Such is the extent of his jurisdiction, and with most full and wanton license has he revelled among its privileges. The whole earth labours and is in violence because of his cruelties; and from the amphitheatre of sentient Nature there sounds in fancy's ear the bleat of one wide and universal suffering.-a dreadful homage to the power of Nature's constituted lord.

These sufferings are really felt. The beasts of the field are not so many automata without sensation, and just so constructed as to give forth all the natural signs and expressions of it. Nature hath not practised this universal deception upon our species. These poor animals just look, and tremble, and give forth the very indications of suffering that we do. Theirs is the distinct cry of pain. Theirs is the unequivocal physiognomy of pain. They put on the same aspect of terror on the demonstrations of a menaced blow. They exhibit the same distortions of agony after the infliction of it. The bruise, or the burn, or the fracture, or the deep incision, or the fierce encounter with one of equal or superior strength, just affects them similarly to ourselves. Their blood circulates as ours. They have pulsations in various parts of the body as ours. They sicken, and they grow feeble with age, and, finally, they die, just as we do. They possess the same feelings; and, what exposes them to like suffering from another quarter, they possess the same instincts with our own species. The lioness robbed of her whelps causes the wilderness to ring aloud with the proclamation of her wrongs; or the bird whose little household has been stolen fills and saddens all the grove with melodies of deepest pathos. All this is palpable even to the general and unlearned eye: and when the physiologist lays open the their system by means of that scalpel under whose operation they just shrink and are convulsed as any living subject of our own species, there stands forth to view the same sentient apparatus, and furnished with the same conductors for the transmission of feeling to every minutest pore upon the surface. Theirs is unmixed and unmitigated pain, the agonies of martyrdom without the alleviation of the hopes and the sentiments whereof they are incapable. When they lay them down to die, their only fellowship is with suffering: for in the prison-house of their beset and bounded faculties there can no relief be afforded by communion with other interests or other things. The attention does not lighten their distress as it does that of man, by carrying off his spirit from that existing pungency and pressure which

recesses of

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might else be overwhelming. There is but room in their mysterious economy for one inmate, and that is the absorbing sense of their own single and concentrated anguish. And so in that bed of torment whereon the wounded animal lingers and expires, there is an unexplored depth and intensity of suffering which the poor dumb animal itself cannot tell, and against which it can offer no remonstrance,-an untold and unknown amount of wretchedness of which no articulate voice gives utterance. But there is an eloquence in its silence; and the very shroud which disguises it only serves to aggravate its horrors.

HORACE BINNEY, LL.D.,

born in Philadelphia, January 4, 1780, graduated at Harvard University, 1797, died August 12, 1875, was long distinguished as

one of the most eminent lawyers of the United States. Publications: Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania from 1790 to 1814, Phila., 1809-15, 6 vols. 8vo; Eulogium upon Hon. William Tilghman, 1827, 8vo (reprinted with Eulogium upon Chief Justice Justice Marshall, 1836, Svo (see above); Marshall, 1861, 8vo); Eulogium upon Chief Argument in the Case of Vidal v. the City Case); Murphy v. Hubert: Review of the of Philadelphia, 1844, 8vo (Girard Will Opinion of the Supreme Court that the Pennsylvania Act of Frauds and Perjuries does not extend to Equitable Estates, 1848, 8vo; Centennial Address before the Philadelphia Contributionship, on the History and Principles of that Insurance Company,

and of Fire Insurance in the United States 1852, 8vo; Bushrod Washington, 1858, 8vo; The Leaders of the Old Bar of Philadelphia, 1859, 8vo; An Inquiry into the Formation 8vo; The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas of Washington's Farewell Address, 1859, Corpus under the Constitution, 1862, 8vo, Second Part, 1862, 8vo, Third Part, 1865, 8vo.

His address upon John Sergeant will be found in Wallace's Circuit Reports, vol. ii. "Mr. Binney is the head in the bar of the United States."-CHARLES SUMNER AND W. M. EVARTS

TO S. AUSTIN ALLIBONE.

"At any time he would have been considered a most fit person to be placed on the bench [which he refused]. We regret that he never was: his mind is eminently judicial, and his general learning and accomplishments would have adorned the professional research which he would have brought to the decision of all questions, while his high personal character would have added authority to his judgments."-SIR JOHN T. COLERIDGE: (London) Quar. Review, April, 1860.

"I sincerely wish Mr. Binney would comply with your request, and collect his speeches, and

such arguments as are adapted for the general reader, in a volume. It would be as valuable a one of the kind as was ever published. I have

often said that I had never listened to a speaker who treated a politico-legal question so exhaustively as Mr. Binney. Of all the men I have known, I would have preferred him as the successor of Ch. J. Maisball."-EDWARD EVERETT TO S. AUSTIN ALLIBONE, Boston, 1st Feb., 1864.

WHO WAS THE AUTHOR OF WASHINGTON'S

FAREWELL ADDRESS?

No one, who has formed a just estimate of that great man, can imagine that he regarded his personal dignity, or his personal value and efficiency, and, least of all, his true claims to respect and reverence, as reduced or compromised, in the least degree, by his asking the aid of a friend, who had been his trusted minister, to arrange his thoughts, or to improve their expression, upon any public subject on which he felt it his duty to speak. He was so high-spirited and sensitive, as well as sincere, that the glimpse of such a thought would have turned him aside, as certainly, perhaps, as any man that ever lived. The resort to such assistance was all the more likely to be made, because no one was more justly entitled to feel conscious that his powers of thought and expression were such as to place him on a perfect level with his office and duties; though on occasions when he might encounter criticism from enemies or adversaries, and he had them both, he may have thought that his active life had not permitted him to become so sure of the various colours and shades of language, or so intimate with the best forms of composition, as to enable him to select with facility, in the face of such critics, the plan and words which would give the most certain and effective expression to his thoughts, and the best protection against their perversion.

It is a small question to raise, after the death of two great public men, neither of whom, in his lifetime, suffered the breath of dishonour to condense upon his garments; and each of whom, in his claims to a deathless reputation, could have referred to a thousand proofs that are stronger than the Farewell Address, or the original draught of it. But having been raised, through accident or design, through levity or malevolence, my admiration of each has made me unwilling to withhold the humble labour of putting it in its proper light in regard to both.

Having now concluded this Inquiry, after placing in the body of it, or pointing out in the documents it refers to, ample and authentic materials from which every reader may form an opinion for himself, there is

little occasion for expressing my own upon the whole matter. I must avoid, however, it altogether at the conclusion, after having, the appearance of affectation, by suppressing no doubt, intimated portions of it incidentally, and sometimes perhaps unintentionally, in the course of the essay.

I have not the least intention, however, of either instituting or leading to, a comparison of the respective values of the several contributions to the Farewell Address. If that question shall be raised, of which I should think there is little probability, at least among men who have sufficient sentiment to regard that address as the testament of Washington, and Hamilton as the inditer of his Will, the comparison must have dif ferent results, as it shall be made upon either political, or moral, or literary grounds; for values of these descriptions are not comparable altogether in their nature, one or more of them passing by weight, adjusted upon exact principles, and one at least by a variable and rather arbitrary scale of taste or convention. Even the more ponderable parts are by no means on one side only. My disposition is to describe, and not to compare.

Washington was undoubtedly the original designer of the Farewell Address; and not merely by general or indefinite intimation, but by the suggestion of perfectly definite subjects, of an end or object, and of a general outline, the same which the paper now exhibits. His outline did not appear so distinctly in his own plan, because the subjects were not so arranged in it as to show that they were all comprehended within a regular and proportional figure; but when they came to be so arranged in the present Address, the scope of the whole design is seen to be contained within the limits he intended, and to fill them. The subjects were traced by him with adequate precision, though without due connection, with little expansion, and with little declared bearing of the parts upon each other, or towards a common centre: but they may now be followed with ease in their proper relations and bearing in the finished paper, such only excepted as he gave his final consent and approbation to exclude.

In the most common and prevalent sense of the word among literary men, this may not, perhaps, be called authorship; but in the primary etymological sense,-the quality of imparting growth or increase.-there can be no doubt that it is so. By derivation from himself, the Farewell Address speaks the very mind of Washington. The fundamental thoughts and principles were his; but he was not the composer or writer of the paper.